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Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

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Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#121

Post by seanalltogether »

tootie wrote: post #36

It seems to me that Slack is very vulnerable. Their core product isn't all that innovative and already has credible competitors who could probably beat their price. In fact, I don't understand how they beat HipChat so soundly. I wonder if their next tack will be to start digging a moat of proprietary tooling now that they have a critical mass of adoption.

We used Hipchat a lot back in the days. I remember the biggest frustrations for us was that there was no multi-team support, so co-workers were doing crazy workarounds with multiple copies of the same application on different icon and bundle ids. Additionally HipChat was down quite a lot from what i remember.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#122

Post by eapartridge »

rkrzr wrote: post #115

If self-hosting is an option for you, I can highly recommend looking into Mattermost as an open source Slack replacement. We have been using it for the last 2 years and it has been working pretty much flawlessly for us. Upgrading it is really painless too, since it is just one Go binary that automatically applies DB migrations when it detects that you moved to a new version.

Interesting! How do you find Mattermost does in terms of integrations with GitHub etc? I see that there seems to be a bit of a community around it, but I wonder how stable / reliable / usable they are?

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#123

Post by LinuxBender »

Zealotux wrote: post #54
everyone wrote: post #12

Has anyone considered using Discord instead of Slack? They seem very similar.

I use both and I find Discord to be much better, I don't understand why they don't release a "corporate" paid version that would basically be the current version but with a different skin and without all of the gamer nonsense.

A corporate version of Discord, ideally on-prem, would make a lot of sense. Their current data retention policy for the public discord servers would violate many corporate data retention policies.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#124

Post by jartelt »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #16

That's a crazy evaluation, is that company really worth 7.1Instagrams? It really is a nice product, but it feels like a 'First-To-Market' success story. Especially since it's built on top of electron, which I'm still trying to accept as a real platform for application development, and not the '3d printer' of the software world. I hope they don't use this money to feature-swamp the app, and instead focus inward on per…

A lot of people said $1B for Instagram was overpaying and were proven wrong.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#125

Post by tpaschalis »

akeck wrote: post #48

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

My experience with MS Teams contradict what I've mostly seen on HN.

Coming from a Linux background, I had lost touch with the Microsoft ecosystem for the most part of a decade and would actively avoid Microsoft related stuff.

When I got a new job, I had to use the whole SharePoint/O365/Teams stack, instead of Slack, in medium-sized teams. It feels much more lightweight and responsive, chat history and search works way better than Slack (for now, at least), and is miles ahead of Skype in terms of not dropping messages, and you know, actually allowing you to chat and call.

I'm not using the O365 integration extensively, and generally view/edit documents as they're supposed to (files), but in the cases I've needed to make some changes in an Excel file, I didn't have any issues.

Of course it suffers from all the problems that an ephemeral, short-term memory chat application does in an organization, but that's to be expected.

Edit : Not affiliated with MS in any way. If I can answer any questions, let me know.

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#128

Post by mercer »

hvidgaard wrote: post #72
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.

Much as I usually try to understand the 'business end' of things, I have to say that I'm baffled that Slack hasn't done this yet.

I rather like Slack, and have good reasons to use it (it's pretty central to Elixir's community, for one), but even on my relatively beefy MBP (2015) I actively avoid having the app open because it's a heavy Electron piece of shit.

While of course I might be a bit of an outlier as a developer with a preference for 'lighter' applications (and comfortable with CLI stuff), surely I'm not that much of an outlier...

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#129

Post by iambateman »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #31
maxehmookau wrote: post #17

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”.

So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k.

* not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Everywhere. ;)

Re: Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B

#130

Post by gkanai »

acconrad wrote: post #127

I'm new to venture deals (just read the book of the same name) and I have a question: Slack seems to be in peacetime: aggressive growth, buying things like HipChat. If they're dominating the market, why would they need to raise money?

> why would they need to raise money?

The thinking is that the more a hot company can raise, the longer they can stay public.

In the current cycle, IPOs are more rare than in previous cycles (partly because FAANG are acquiring more companies and partly because companies are waiting longer to IPO) so having more cash on hand gives the company that much more runway.

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